November 17, 2011

The bill does not include language to protect transgender people in public accommodations, which advocates had sought. They will continue to fight to expand transgender protections to include public accommodations, such as hotels, restaurants, and clubs, she said. Opponents had decried those proposals as “the bathroom bill,’’ arguing that they would enable biological men to demand access to women’s restrooms and locker rooms.

64 comments:

When my bride was a caseworker @ the Federal MCC[jail] in Chicago she had an inmate on her caseload who was in the midst of a sex change. He had developed breasts via hormones but still had a dick. What floor, males or female, do you think she placed him?

You've never been in a nightclub on around 11pm or so on a Friday or Saturday night? It always irked me that women felt like they had the freedom to walk into the mens room whenever they wanted, line or not, because "the women's bathroom is just packed". I was a bouncer for years and this happened ALL the time. If you challenged them on it, purely on the basis of fairness, nine times out of ten they would tell you to grow up.

The reverse, obviously, was not true. A man trying to Rosa Parks into the women's bathroom was subsequently Road Housed.

You've never been in a nightclub on around 11pm or so on a Friday or Saturday night? It always irked me that women felt like they had the freedom to walk into the mens room whenever they wanted, line or not, because "the women's bathroom is just packed".

Not ia a long, long time, but women had the same attitude back then. Liberating, I guess.

Sorry if I offend any trannies here, but it would have been a bathroom bill.

A couple of years ago, there was a to-do in Scottsdale, AZ, about just this. Several pre-reassignment males would try to hang out in the women's bathrooms at clubs there. They hadn't progressed very far, because they still had beard lines. In other words, they appeared to the women in the restrooms as males in dresses. The women were all freaked out, and the guys in dresses were asked not to come back. They made a big thing about it, but last I knew, it hadn't gone anywhere.

The clubs had to react that way - those sorts of clubs rely on the women to bring in the guys, and if it got around that a club was allowing this, the women would go elsewhere.

Maybe not as enlightened as NYC or San Francisco, but likely a lot closer to reality around this country.

If I'm not mistaken, "gender identification" has been the bathroom rule for a while now at least in Boston. I've watched a linebacker-sized dude in a dress, heels and long hair wig repeatedly use a public women's restroom to the dismay of the women emerging therefrom. Very Norman Bates.

Meanwhile, I have my haircut by a former male who had a sex change operation after he came to this country and opened his shop across the street from my office.

In a new twist on an old story, he literally came to this country and "worked his balls off".

My impression is that generally "transgender" is a purely political designation. Advocates of such legislation generally pay little or no attention to the biologically intersexed and to XXY individuals (about 1 in 1000 people). Rest assured the "the Lesbian, Gay, Transgender movement" are elitist bigots or they would acknowledge the unique concerns of and accept the legitimacy of the biologically intersexed rather than ignore them to protect the sacred dogma of "biological sexual orientation."

Being in Massachusetts I did write to my representative on this issue, I suggested the unisex/family bathroom in large venues should suffice. For smaller places have two individual bathrooms without designating them by sex, for example in an airplane.

I suppose the burning question, Micheal, is whether or not GM or those of his likemind would assume that "corrective" sex-change operations should be covered by government mandated health care insurance.

If health care is a human right (I don't believe it is) and people can be clinically unable to identify with the body they were born with, doesn't it follow that it is their human right to get, nay, DEMAND that they be made healthy, mentally and physically?

What about eye sight while we're at it? If I'm not 20/20, am I unhealthy? By who's definition are we going by? If I'm not 20/20, do I have the right to be?

Yes, the transgendered do generally look like their "believed" gender. I had one acquaintance who looked very feminine, if you could get past her 6-foot-plus height; it was weeks before I learned that she was a pre-op MTF tranny.

Shanna, Why support gay rights but not transgendered? Due to the fatherless in so many homes, I still hold onto marriage as a man and a woman. Not out of bigotry. Still I get accused of hate, and will until the day I die. I support a lot of the transgendered concerns, just as I may understand someone isn't straight. It seems to be, that's what they are.I tend to come to the conclusion, that truly they see sex-change as a corrective surgery.

Not Shanna, but I completely agreed with her comment, so I'll bite.

If someone wants to have surgery to change their appearance, I don't really object, as long as they're not expecting me to pay for it. I think it's kind of silly, I'm not going to feel sorry for them the way that I would a person recovering from, say, an appendectomy (more like from a breast augmentation), but whatever.

But I'm not going to pretend that they're not the sex they were born with. There's no such thing as a biological "mistake" whatever that even means. Intersex issues, which are incredibly rare, aside, there isn't a "mental" female or male- you simply are one or the other. I resent being asked to pretend that something is the case which clearly is not. I resent children who are just learning about things like this being told that some sense of "feelings" means that they have to deny obvious reality, because if you deny reality there, why would you feel like you have to constrained to it in other places? (i.e., you would fall for all sorts of policies because they "should" work or "feel good.")

If you want to act in a way that is typically associated with the opposite sex, have at it. I'm in a profession that was once limited to not my sex; I think it's great to change things and reverse stereotypes and limitations. In fact, I find it offensive that the person who believes that he/she is the "wrong" sex is seeing such a limited definition of what they as the sex they are can do. But that doesn't mean that we deny reality, and it doesn't mean that we do away with rules that are in place for good reasons in ways that compromise safety and privacy, such as separate bathrooms.

I don't doubt that people who feel that way do believe that. As do people who feel like they should be amputees feel like the limb in question is offensive and the cause of their problems. That doesn't make it so, and I don't think that we should play into their delusions.

- Lyssa

(That was really long. Please read it as polite discussion; I'm not as ranty as I sound, and it's not even an issue I really care or even think about except when it comes up and I have time to comment like this.)

Of course, businesses will never be required to make accommodations for them or hire them, nor will public schools be forced to accommodate, hire, and teach about transgenders. Churches, too, won't be affected.

Pogo, I see gay marriage and protection for transgender individuals as two different ideas.

Marriage is about relationships. Why the state has an interest in marriage? My conclusion isn't rights, but obligations to the child. Just live in a area with high rates of children not living with both their mother and father. The results are evident in risk factors in their social well-being in fatherless homes.

As for transgender rights, it is focused on the individual and not necessarily a relationship to others. The idea of reassignment is scary for people, who have their sex organs match what is how they see themselves. I can't imagine it myself. Yet, my personal feelings aside, there can be some logical reasons on a hormonal/physiological level, that reassignment could be argued as corrective surgery.

Yet, my personal feelings aside, there can be some logical reasons on a hormonal/physiological level, that reassignment could be argued as corrective surgery.

Should taxpayers have to pay for "reassignment" in order to make that person healthy and whole?

The very term, "reassignment" is loaded with what sounds like a conscious decision of gender in the first place. Much like the rest of the issue, it's ridiculous enough that it shouldn't be smacking the citizenry in the face via the legislature.

Obviously they have unemployment, debt, homelessness, and the Kennedy's all figured out, so there's nothing else to take care of in MA.

I've decided that I want to be a woman on all days of the week that start with "T". I'll be a man the other five days. Oh, except for Thanksgiving, I think I want to be a man on that day so that I can eat a turkey leg with my bare hands.

"It's every man's right to be a woman if he wants to." - Stan, 'Life Of Brian'